Fortunately for our planet, some people have dedicated themselves to reversing mankind’s mistakes. In honor of World Oceans Day Thursday, HuffPost is highlighting groundbreaking inventions that were designed to take care of the sea.

The SeaBin, created by two Australian surfers, is a bucket with a pump and water filtration system that is designed to suck debris from any marina or dock. The bucket includes an optional oil-water separator system that will pull oil right out of the ocean, then spit out cleaner water through the other side of the pump.

When Boyan Slat first presented his plan to clear out half of the trash floating in the garbage patch between California and Hawaii, he was just a teenager with a really ambitious idea. Now, three years later, Slat’s blueprints are close to becoming reality.

Slat’s organization, The Ocean Cleanup, has raised an estimated $31.5 million to develop a drifting V-shaped system designed to collect plastic pollution at the ocean’s surface as currents push it along.

3. This technology that turns plastic waste into oil

Adrian Griffiths from the British company Recycling Technologies is using a machine the size of a tennis court in a trash processing center west of London to break down a variety of plastic products, including cling wrap and electronics, and turn them into usable materials or energy-producing oil.

Bloomberg reports that the machine heats up the waste to 932 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the debris into a vapor. It’s then cooled to create one of three different materials: a fuel that can be sold to petrochemical companies, a wax-like substance that’s similar to what ship engines burn or a brown wax that can be used for shoe polish or cosmetics.

Eliminating plastics entirely from our lives isn't feasible, but we can all start<strong><i>&nbsp;minimizing our plastic waste</i> (</strong>and really, all waste in general) ― that includes recyclable plastics and compostable or biodegradable ones too. <br><br>&ldquo;Someone might buy a new iPhone and say, well, since I recycled my old phone with Apple, I&rsquo;m all good. But Apple doesn&rsquo;t tell you just how little of that iPhone actually gets recycled,&rdquo; said Adam Minter, author of <i>Junkyard Planet: Travels in The Billion-Dollar Trash Trade</i>. &ldquo;People need to stop thinking of recycling as a &lsquo;get-out-of-jail-free&rsquo; card. You haven&rsquo;t actually done anything <i>good </i>for the environment. You&rsquo;ve just done something less bad.&rdquo; (More on that below.)<br><br>&ldquo;If we really want to deal with the waste problem we&rsquo;re facing, we need to think deeper about the nature of consumption itself,&rdquo; Minter said.